портал в иные Галактики: крошка третья

An impenetrable barrier to ultrarelativistic electrons in the Van Allen radiation belts

The scattering lifetimes of highly relativistic electrons inside the plasmapause are very long, and so we do not believe that the observed sharp inner edge is due to some anomalous fast loss process. Thus, we conclude that the persistent inner edge represents a remarkably stable boundary where weak scattering losses are dominant over even weaker radial diffusion transport. The fact that the inner edge can move abruptly during solar disturbances suggests that its location can be changed either by a pronounced increase in the radial diffusion rate or by further local acceleration.

once the ultrarelativistic electron population is formed at such low L, it will stay in place subject only to very slow decay on a timescale of 100 d . These results therefore demonstrate that extraordinarily strong spatial gradients can be maintained for quite long times in ultrarelativistic electron-trapping geometries.